My recommendation is to choose Satellite mode, with the 3rd Zoom level. It makes me feel like flying in the sky, just as birds. Because of Google Maps JS library prefetching images, sometimes you have a delay (latency) moving, but other than that, it is quite fantastic.

The code is available here in my svn repository. Note that because it uses ActiveX, you need to download the gmaps.html locally and open it with Windows IE. The app is written in JavaScript (using Google Maps API) and ActivePerl's PerlScript inside Windows IE. You need to install Win32API-File CPAN module (use ppm to install) before running it.